


Abyssal Irradiance

by sequence_fairy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Digressions into evolution and space-time, M/M, Post-Quantum Abyss, introspective, mild pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 02:22:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19097815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: Two years on the back of a space whale gives you a lot of time to think. It had been quiet for the most part, but it hadn’t chafed like the silence in the desert had. Out there, in the sand, Keith had been so desperately lonely, cut off from anything that felt like family, and constantly keeping his eyes on the sky. Hoping, always, that he’d see the streak of something coming back to earth, anything to stop the ceaseless questions.Keith has had two years to think about all that he wants and now he's on his way to it, and all he can think about is how terrified he is of losing it again.





	Abyssal Irradiance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tootsonnewts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tootsonnewts/gifts).



> For Ashley, who asked for Keith after the space whale, taking stock of his relationships and what he wants when he gets back to the rest of the team. (Romelle happened to be along for the ride.)

Space is quiet this time of the night cycle. Keith likes it the best. No expectations at three am, after all, he thinks to himself, a smile itching at the corner of his mouth. Beside him, the wolf chuffs softly to itself. Keith lets one hand fall from the control panel, burying his gloved fingers in the wolf’s thick ruff. The fur, Keith knows, is soft as silk, and warm. The wolf’s eyes open to sleepy slits, peering up at Keith from the floor as Keith pets the ruff back into place, and then smooths his palm down between the wolf’s ears.

Keith looks back up, outside of the lion’s viewscreen, there’s really nothing but distant stars and the spill of cosmic gasses to his left that make up some unknown nebula. They’ve been flying for almost two days. Even with the speed this Altean pod can produce, it’ll still be another couple of days until they reach the last known coordinates of the Castle. They’ll have to hope, when they get there, that the Castle is still within hailing range, since Keith hasn’t been able to raise anyone since they escaped the quantum abyss.

With some help from Romelle, who is surprisingly good at jiggery-pokery, Keith has been able to patch the news feeds into one of the tablets they snagged while they were absconding with the pod. This means he’s caught up on the barely twelve hours that have passed for everyone else while he was stranded.

He’d been worried when they finally escaped the abyss’ pull, that the same amount of time had passed for everyone else. Worried that the rest of the paladins would think he was dead, or something worse. Learning that he’d truly only lost twelve hours was both reassuring and terrifying. The team hadn’t even realised they’d disappeared, had probably not even begun to worry.

Krolia had sent an FTL transmission packet to the nearest Blade outpost when they’d broken back into normal space. The message had been simple; they were safe, they had news, and were on their way back. She’d asked Keith if he’d had anything he wanted to say, but he’d shaken his head, unable to think of anything that he wouldn’t rather say out loud.

Two years on the back of a space whale gives you a lot of time to think. It had been quiet for the most part, but it hadn’t chafed like the silence in the desert had. Out there, in the sand, Keith had been so desperately lonely, cut off from anything that felt like family, and constantly keeping his eyes on the sky. Hoping, always, that he’d see the streak of something coming back to earth, anything to stop the ceaseless questions.

Getting Shiro back in the way that he had was a gift from the universe, Keith knows. He also knows that the universe is disinclined to give without taking something in return. It had, after all, given him the gift of Shiro’s friendship, the gift of flight, and the gift of finally feeling like he was where he was meant to be. And maybe, some of those things were paid for in advance, but something deep in Keith’s hindbrain knows that the universe is still owed, and that his debt is compounded now by getting Krolia back too.

The pod shudders, and Keith looks down at the instrument panel in front of him. Gravity wells, he thinks, looking at the readout. He taps at the screen, retaking control from the autopilot, and hauls the pod into a tight roll. The artificial grav combined with extremely effective inertia dampening means that no one but him will know they’re spinning. Navigating through the invisible minefield occupies his entire mind, leaving him no room to ruminate on what price the universe might extract from him this time.

The pod jerks a little when Keith passes too close to one of the wells, but his fingers fly over the haptic display, course corrections and shield modulation calculations nearly as second-nature as the feeling of the grip of his knife. Once through the sector, Keith re-engages the autopilot, and pulls up the sensor array along with the telemetry from the gravity wells. A third holoscreen joins the first two, Keith’s scratch pad while he merges the data sets into something he can add to the autopilot subroutine in order to help the pod navigate these kinds of situations on its own, if they encounter them again, because while both he and Krolia are adept, Romelle isn’t, and Keith doesn’t particularly want to be thrown out of bed while the pod is being torn apart.

It takes him most of the rest of his turn at the helm to put together the subroutine, and when Krolia comes up to relieve him, he shows her how to plug it into the nav commands. She squeezes his shoulder, and Keith ducks his head, pleased with her wordless praise.

“Get some sleep,” she chides, when he stands and stretches. Keith’s shoulders pop as he raises his hands over his head, and he lets them fall before shaking out his arms. Krolia slides into the pilot’s chair.

“‘Night,” Keith says. The wolf opens one eye to peer at him, and Keith leans down to pet through his ruff again. “You want me to take him?” Keith asks.

Krolia shakes her head. “No, he can stay, I don’t mind the company.”

Keith leaves her to it.

The sleeping quarters on the pod are small and perfunctory, a set of bunks recessed into the wall off what passes for a galley. Romelle is still curled up on her bunk, facing the wall, long blonde hair plaited into a complicated braid. Krolia had done it so quickly, Keith remembers, and Romelle had been so pleased turning her head this way and that to admire herself in the only mirror on the ship.

Keith’s stomach grumbles, interrupting his plans to fall into the other bunk and sleep through most of Krolia’s shift.

It’s food goo or food goo, so Keith settles for a bowl of food goo and parks himself at the little table tucked away in one corner of the sparse living quarters. These pods are obviously not meant for long journeys with several people aboard, but the three of them have done reasonably well to stay out of each other’s way. When all three of them are awake, it is a little cramped, but they make it work. It helps that the wolf stays up in the cockpit most of the time. Keith eats absently, tasting nothing and surprising himself when his spoon hits the bottom of the bowl.

The noise makes Romelle twitch, and Keith feels guilty immediately. They all need whatever sleep they can get, and he knows that Romelle gets less than she should. Keith’s always been able to drop off wherever he is, and wake up ready to go, but Romelle wakes herself up screaming or crying with the kind of regularity that worries both Keith and Krolia. She won’t talk about the nightmares, but Keith recognizes the signs.

She’s haunted, he thinks, by what happened to her brother, and what she witnessed on their flight. Keith doesn’t blame her. He sets the bowl down carefully, and tugs the datapad he’s made his own closer to him across the table. From the other side of the room, Romelle sighs in her sleep. Keith spares her a quick glance, taking in the furrow in her brows, and the way her hands have clenched into the blanket. She’ll wake herself up soon, he knows, and he debates whether to wake her up before she gets to that point, but then her face smooths out, hands going slack, and Keith turns back to his datapad.

He taps through the news feeds, absently, not seeing much of what scrolls across his screen. Nothing catches his attention, so he swaps from the news feeds to the ops controls for the pod, thinking he might fine-tune his new subroutine, or maybe run the regular diagnostic scripts to test for further flight efficiency. Instead, his hand hovers over the commlink, and he thinks about the message they’re bleating out into space, that repeating code going over and over into the void.

Suppose the Castle does pick it up, Keith wonders, would Pidge know how to parse it? Would Allura? Maybe Coran. Keith sighs, and taps back out of the comms app and into the lines of code that’ll let him set the parameters of his diagnostic tests.

The tap on his shoulder jolts him, but Keith is Blade-trained and a Paladin of Voltron, so he does not yelp or otherwise indicate that he might’ve been startled. He sets down the tablet, with deliberate care and then turns. Romelle’s hand is pressed over her mouth, hiding her smile, but Keith can see the way it lights up her eyes regardless. She reminds him of Allura at her most impish.

“Sorry,” Romelle says, “didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You didn’t,” Keith says, automatically. Romelle’s smile stretches wider. Keith lets his own run away with his carefully neutral expression, unable to help himself.

“Think I did,” Romelle argues, but when Keith shakes his head and huffs a laugh, she doesn’t push. Instead, she leans over him to look at the datapad’s readout. “Are you looking for output inefficiencies?”

“Yeah,” Keith says, thumbing through the lines of code. He’s been staring at it for long enough that he’s probably going cross-eyed and frankly, he should probably just go to bed, but he did want to make this work. “I can’t get it to compile the data properly though,” he complains, and Romelle pulls the tablet closer to herself.

“Hunh,” she says, tapping through his code, brow furrowing. Her eyes widen suddenly, and she looks up at him. “Oh,” she says, “come with me.” Romelle grabs the tablet, and without waiting to see if Keith is following, she leaves, heading towards the engineering alcove.

Keith scrambles after her, and joins her just as she’s flicking his code up onto the holo-screen bank. Her fingers fly over the keyboard, flicking another screen up and then two more. The first one, she pulls down and away from the other three. “Here,” she says, pinching and zooming the first screen down to a section of code, “your command syntax is wobbly. Who taught you to program?”

“No one,” Keith says, defensive.

Romelle turns around. There’s something soft and sad in the edge of her smile. “You taught yourself?”

“The Garrison taught us the basics, everything else I’ve learned by doing, or watching someone else.” Keith folds his arms across his chest.

Romelle nods. “Alright. Well, look,” she says, and leans back into the screen, editing his code, “if you used this command instead, and then changed the variable to this data set–”

“Oh, then it’ll pull from the stored telemetry, to compare with the incoming data,” Keith interrupts, leaning in to get a closer look at what she’s doing.

Romelle grins. “Exactly!” She tugs the third holoscreen towards herself, and sets Keith’s diagnostic script to run. Data compiles on the screen in front of them. While he wasn’t looking, Romelle has entered a an extra set of commands that turn several of the data points red, to flag them to their attention. “I’ve added a flag,” she says, noticing what Keith’s looking at. “I can show you how to do that, it’s crude, but it should at least give you a place to start.”

“Sure,” Keith says, then he yawns, jaw-cracking and huge. “Jesus,” he says, eyes watering.

“You need to sleep,” Romelle says, gently. “I can watch this.”

“Does it need watching?” Keith asks. He knows it doesn’t. The script will run in the background, and at the end, the report will wait, for whoever checks it, or doesn’t check it.

“Probably not,” Romelle agrees, “I guess I just … don’t want to disturb you while you’re sleeping.”

“You could go up to sit with my–with Krolia, if you wanted?”

“I don’t want to get in her way,” Romelle says, hunching her shoulders.

“You wouldn’t,” Keith says, decisive. Romelle doesn’t look convinced. “Krolia likes you,” he tries, but Romelle shakes her head.

“It’s not that,” she says, “I’m just–” Romelle sighs and turns away from the holoscreens to look out the viewport on the docking hatch on the side of the ship. There are no stars, so there is no feeling of movement, just the pseudo-static sense of hanging in space, forever. The black is endless. Romelle shakes her head and turns away from the view. Keith stays silent, he’s never been one to push for answers, always figuring that if someone wanted to tell him something, they would tell him eventually, in their own time.

Romelle’s fingers splay on the keyboard. They’re delicate, tipped with the same pearly nails that Allura has. Evolutionary leftovers, Keith thinks, from a time when they needed claws. Just like the hint of fang, so like his own. Joining the Blades was the first time in Keith’s time in space that he’d had access to updated records. It had taken time to learn enough Galran to parse the search functions and hours during downtime between missions with his datapad, the translator app at the ready, to brush up on a basic history of the universe and everything.

The Alteans and the Galra were apex predators in a universe full of prey creatures. Keith leans against the bulkhead, arms crossed over his chest. Romelle is staring intently at the code in front of her, resolutely ignoring him. It’s harder with Romelle, to see the predator she was bred from. Allura had ten thousand years of stasis to put her into evolutionary pause. Keith wonders what Allura will think when she sees Romelle, who is the result of an additional ten thousand years of biological change.

It’s been two years and some months for him, and Keith knows the changes that time has wrought. He’s taller, broader through the shoulders, and settled, in a way that he hasn’t been in years. He feels like he used to feel when he first started flying at the Garrison, in that moment when you break through the clouds and hit the sun at several thousand feet, and all you can see is blue. It’s nice to feel it without having hundreds of pounds of thrust roaring behind his head.

“Do you think she’ll like me?” Romelle asks, breaking Keith out of his thoughts.

“Who? Allura?”

Romelle nods, still not looking at him. Her hair has fallen around her face, further hiding her from view.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say that Allura likes everyone, but she doesn’t. She values every life, and works hard to save as many of them as she can, but that is not the same as liking everyone. Keith chews on his unsaid words for a moment. Romelle turns to look at him, and he can see the nerves in the tightness around her eyes. Keith huffs out a breath. “Allura’s … well, she can be tough, but she’s fair and she appreciates people for who they are instead of their background or role.”

Romelle scrunches her nose. “Do you think she’ll be happy to know there are more Alteans?”

“I do,” Keith says. He looks down at his crossed arms, and then back up at Romelle. “You know she’s spent all this time thinking that she and Coran are the last ones? She’ll be thrilled to meet you.”

“I can’t imagine being the last of something,” Romelle says softly, looking back at the screen in front of her. “That would be so lonely.”

Wouldn’t it just, Keith thinks. He remembers being the last of something. It had ached and burned in his chest, the knowledge that there was no one left of his family but him, that his name would die with him, because there was no room in him for anyone else. Lightning had struck twice in Keith’s life, once before he’d even been able to conceptualize the loss and then again both figuratively and literally.

“Who are you most looking forward to seeing again?” Romelle asks. The shift in topic makes Keith blink and glance quickly to his right to see if Romelle is looking at him. She isn’t, but her hair is hooked back behind her ear and he can see the way she’s worrying at her lip with her teeth.

_Shiro_. “Everyone,” Keith answers, “I miss them.” He does. He’s not sure they missed him, he hopes they did, but maybe he pinned too much on the tenuous bonds of something a little deeper than teammates.

“How did you all meet?” Romelle leans away from the keyboard, turning on her stool and hooking her feet under the bottom rung.

“Ah,” Keith hedges, but then decides to run with it. “I met Shiro first. He was recruiting for the Garrison, and came to visit my class in school. I stole his car.” Keith can hear the wistfulness in his own voice as he says it.

“You stole his car!?” Romelle leans forward, palms planted on the tops of her knees. “And you’re still friends?”

“Oh yeah,” Keith says, letting himself enjoy the thrill of happiness this memory stirs in his chest. “Shiro used to tell that story to anyone who would listen. He got me into the Garrison, you know. They weren’t gonna let me in. I had a … history with the MPs.”

“MPs?”

“Military Police,” Keith clarifies, “sorry. The Garrison’s a joint forces base. It specialised in near-earth space travel, and was _the_ place to go if you wanted to fly anything out of upper atmo. And boy, once I got there, did I want to fly.”

Romelle’s looking at him, sort of soft and fond, and Keith clears his throat.

“The others I met later, when we were rescuing Shiro after he crash-landed during his escape from the arena.” The previous warmth shrivels under the weight of everything that happened in the intervening time between meeting Shiro and finding him strapped to a table like an unruly experiment. Romelle’s brows furrow, but she doesn’t push. Keith assumes Krolia had sketched her a Brief History of Keith early on in their little space flight, so he doesn’t explain either.

Romelle hums. “You and Shiro were close, huh?”

“Are close,” Keith corrects, automatically. Then he sighs. “Well,” he says, “when I left … I don’t know, maybe we’re not anymore.”

“What happened?”

Keith looks over at Romelle, but she’s back to pecking at the keyboard in front of her. It’s not in his nature to be forthcoming, and Keith thinks Romelle would accept it if he said he didn’t want to talk about it, but she’s also a neutral party, and if Keith has learned nothing else from dreary trade negotiation meetings, it’s that neutral parties are always the best people to help you untangle a complicated situation. He shoves one hand through his hair, in an attempt to get it to fall properly across his forehead. It’s too long, he needs to do something about it once they get back to the castle.

“I picked the Blade over Voltron,” Keith says finally. “They had Shiro back, you know? They didn’t need two red paladins, or two black paladins, and I just … “ Keith trails off into a noise of frustration.

“You thought you could help more with the Blade,” Romelle finishes, swiveling on the stool to turn to look at him.

“They were so mad,” Keith says, “all of them standing there on the bridge.” It’s Shiro’s face that swims into his mind now, eyebrows pulled together, eyes dark and serious. “I couldn’t stay.”

Romelle makes a noise of sympathy, and gets up. “Look,” she says, coming to a stop in front Keith. She’s shorter than him, but only just, so she only barely has to tilt her head to catch his eyes with hers. “I don’t know the rest of them, but I know you, and I don’t think you would have chosen to go with the Blades if you didn’t think they had it handled.”

Keith’s chest tightens with something, then loosens. “Thanks,” he says, voice tight.

“They’ll be happy to see you,” Romelle assures him. She pokes him in the shoulder. “Now, come on, I want to see if we can figure out how to make these ‘cookies’ your mom was talking about last night.”

Food goo cookies. It reminds him of their early days on the castleship, Hunk trying his damnedest to make shapeless goo into something palatable. It makes him want to smile, so he does. “Have I ever told you about the time Shiro set the officer’s lounge kitchenette on fire trying to microwave a cup of caf?”

Romelle follows him back up to the living space, and behind them, the code flags an incoming transmission, six hours out and closing.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come and chat with me about my fic on [tumblr](http://sequencefairy.tumblr.com) or on [twitter](https://twitter.com/warpspeed_chic).


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